Tom Feelings (May 19, 1933 – August 25, 2003) was a well-known artist, cartoonist, children’s book illustrator, author, teacher, and activist. From the dawn of the U.S. civil rights era, when he came of age as an artist, Feelings was passionately committed to encouraging Black children to understand their own spiritual and physical beauty, a mission he remained faithful to for more than forty years.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, Feelings began to draw at age four, copying pictures from newspaper comic strips into a book of blank pages sewn together by his mother. He was still very young when he heard about Thipadeaux, a Black artist who was teaching at the Police Athletic League in his neighborhood. When Feelings showed some of his drawings to Thipadeaux, the teacher suggested that instead of copying from other people’s work, he try to draw the real people in his neighborhood. Feelings began at home with oil paintings of his mother and aunt and went on to draw the adults and the wary, diffident children he saw around him.
At first, learning to draw was difficult. Thipadeaux pushed Feelings to improve, often making him draw things over and over, but the boy was eager to learn and enjoyed being treated like a serious student. When he was about nine years old, his hunger for knowledge was sharpened by the “magic” world of the adult library. Faced with a school assignment about educator Booker T. Washington and scientist-inventor George Washington Carver, he was dazzled to discover that African American achievements had earned respect from Americans beyond his immediate experience. He was too young to grasp its artistic importance, but he was already beginning to see his neighborhood with the eyes of an objective observer.
Feelings studied at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts), then attended the School of Visual Arts for two years before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1953. Stationed in London, he worked as a staff artist for the Graphics Division of the Third Air Force. From 1959 to 1964 he worked as a freelance artist, drawing primarily on Black life in his community.
By 1961, with an extensive portfolio, he tried to obtain freelance assignments but was often told by editors that he was limiting his chances by focusing on Black subjects. Encouraged by the magazines Freedomways and The Liberator, both with wide Black readerships, he continued to concentrate on African Americans and their lives. In 1962 his determination was rewarded by an assignment for Look magazine as part of a feature titled “The Negro in the U.S.”
In 1964 Feelings traveled to Ghana, where he spent two years working for the Ghanaian government’s magazine The African Review, teaching illustration, and serving as an art consultant for the government publishing house. In 1966 he returned to the United States to focus on illustrating books with African and African American themes. To Be a Slave, written by Julius Lester and illustrated by Feelings, was named a 1969 Newbery Honor Book—the first book of its kind to receive such an award. From 1971 to 1974, Feelings lived in Guyana, South America, working as a teacher and consultant for the Ministry of Education and training young artists in textbook illustration.
Feelings received numerous awards for his illustrations. Moja Means One: A Swahili Counting Book (1971) and Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet Book (1974), both written by Muriel Feelings, were named Caldecott Honor Books and earned Brooklyn Arts Awards for Children citations from the Brooklyn Museum. Jambo Means Hello also received a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in 1974, a Biennial of Illustrations award in Bratislava, and a nomination for the American Book Award in 1982. Something on My Mind won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1978. The School of Visual Arts recognized him with its Outstanding Achievement Award in 1974. Across his career he received eight Certificates of Merit from the Society of Illustrators and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant in 1982, and he was frequently featured on television programs discussing his art and activism.
As Feelings told Horn Book magazine in 1985, “Africa helped make my drawings more fluid and flowing; rhythmic lines started to appear in my work.” Some of this new movement is evident in illustrations of robed Ghanaian women that he painted for his 1972 visual autobiography Black Pilgrimage: proud and graceful, they seem poised to swirl off the page. Another picture shows women in Western dress, baskets on their heads, swaying in unison along a forest path washed in gentle greens and beiges.
Ghana proved an idyllic setting for the developing artist. The entire experience was a spiritual odyssey. Feelings knew that Africa was the homeland of his people and the cradle of civilization long before Europeans docked there. His closeness to that history strengthened the bond he had always felt and crystallized the lesson he most wanted to share. As he explained in Black Pilgrimage: “I am an African, and I know now that black people, no matter in what part of the world they may live, are one African people.”
In 1974 Feelings returned to New York, where he lectured, exhibited across the country, and began work on what would become The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (1995), his searing visual narrative of the transatlantic journeys of enslaved Africans.
Over his career Feelings illustrated around twenty books. Moja Means One and Jambo Means Hello were both named Caldecott Honor Books. Jambo Means Hello also won the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava Award and was nominated for the American Book Award in 1982. In 1987 he illustrated Now Sheba Sings the Song, a collaboration with Maya Angelou; his earlier book Something on My Mind had won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1978, and in 1994 he received a second Coretta Scott King Award for Soul Looks Back in Wonder. For Daydreamers, with poems by Eloise Greenfield, he received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award.
From 1990 to 1995, Feelings served as artist in residence at the University of South Carolina, continuing to refine and exhibit The Middle Passage drawings. He died at age 70 on August 25, 2003, in Mexico, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer.
“When I am asked what kind of work I do, my answer is that I am a storyteller, in picture form, who tries to reflect and interpret the lives and experiences of the people that gave me life. When I am asked who I am, I say, I am an African who was born in America. Both answers connect me specifically with my past and present … therefore I bring to my art a quality which is rooted in the culture of Africa … and expanded by the experience of being in America. I use the vehicle of ‘fine art’ and ‘illustration’ as a viable expression of form, yet striving always to do this from an African perspective, an African world view, and above all to tell the African story … this is my content. The struggle to create artwork as well as to live creatively under any conditions and survive (like my ancestors), embodies my particular heritage in America.”
Sources:
http://www.juneteenth.com/Tom_Feelings.htm
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2346/Feelings-Tom.html#ixzz4938t5Qc1
http://www.nathanielturner.com/tomfeelings.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2003-08-30-arts/tom-feelings-70-an-illustrator-who-portrayed-black-history.html
http://www.penguin.com/author/tom-feelings/237775
